Alteryx Server Ideas

As a system admin, I need a simple, reliable way to back up the Alteryx Server without shutting it down first. A hot-backup (and restore) utility that includes a consistent copy of MongoDB plus any other server config files would allow me to do this.

Not sure if this has already been suggested but I couldn't find it in the ideas...

It would be awesome if in the Gallery some better documentation could be created for the naming of the different private studios, collections, and districts. The naming causes some confusion because it is so different than most other products which causes confusion in our company.

Currently , once a user have SetPriority access ,he can select from Low, Medium, High or Critical priority levels to ensure certain jobs always take priority over others.  

This feature can be misused as users can upgrade their priority levels to jump up the queue and later downgrade the levels. It's difficult to justify and ask each others when you have 1000+ jobs running in a day and it makes administration tough and gives unbiased Gallery to all end users.

It would be nice to have on Admin console, global option to set max priority level so that no user can jump up level beyond this.

The AlteryxService addtoqueue command is great, but it leaves me wanting more.  My simple use case is to run WorkflowB via the addtoqueue command in an after run event from WorkflowA, which is run daily.  The result is that i end up with a cluttered scheduler with many instances of WorkflowB that i need to manually clean up, since addtoqueue creates a new record in AS_Applications each time it runs

It would be useful if there was an AlteryxService command for each of the subroutines already built in to the scheduler front end app: schedule workflow, update workflow, add workflow, remove workflow, edit schedule, etc

MongoDB objects could be identified by oid which the user can get from querying the AlteryxService database

I don't want to rebuild what you've already built, just need a little more control over it 🙂

Hello!
Currently when administrating the Alteryx Server, within the 'users' page, I can see that new users will be setup as 'default'. 

This will display as 'default', which can be confusing, as I need to navigate to the configuration page to remind myself what the default role is. Additionally, they may be part of a group, either in AD or within the server, that upgrades their default rank, for instance if they are part of a group set to be curators. They will still always display as 'default'.

I would like to suggest the following:

This would allow me to see much more clearly who is set as what rank on the Server, but also which users are set to different ranks as part of an AD group.

Hi,

Currently for most of our workflows we are using our private Alteryx Server to run workflows, using executables that call alteryxenginecmd and output logs to dynamically created log files.  However, there is currently no way to leverage a custom log location for a workflow that is run directly from the Alteryx Gallery (apart from sending an email, which has scalability problems).

I would like an option to create the output log as part of a workflow, so that when we save that workflow to the Gallery, it can output a log with a dynamic name easily.

This is a real flaw in the product (almost a bug), you cannot search for a schedule.  We have about 150 jobs scheduled to run daily.  If you want to amend the schedule you have to page next through all the schedules to find it.  If you search for the workflow name, you get the workflow screen which does not contain a link to the schedules.

Also add a link to the schedules for each job on the workflow page.  I.e. search for job ABC, see that it has 3 different schedules associated with it and be able to edit, or delete any of its schedules.

As Alteryx Admin, we want to understand what our users are doing in their workflows as much as possible to ensure best user experience. In order to do this we would like to scan through User workflow XML in order to breakdown everything going on. We understand that their are many posts on workflows already doing a lot of this but:

Our Ask:  is to release XML DTD or similar documentation that can help us breakdown workflows at individual tool levels (as well as differences between tool versions)

This would allow us to further build out solutions to admin visibility of user workflows.

There needs to be a means for Server Admins to delete/clean up subscriptions and users from the system.

Ref: https://help.alteryx.com/server/11.0/admin/index.htm#Administration/Users.htm%3FTocPath%3DAdminister..., “To revoke a user's access to Gallery, deactivate their user account. You cannot delete a Gallery user's account.”

While testing with version 11.0, default permissions set to NO ACCESS, Security using Windows Active Directory, I gave the gallery URL to a random teammate to see what they could access.  While permissions prevented the individual from most activities, the server still created a USER and SUBSCRIPTION for the individual.  Once testing was completed, there was no means possible to clean up these entries., or at least to do more than set them to NO ACCESS.

For most enterprise applications, it is common practice to be able to purge a user account from a system if they are no longer a member of the company.

Our team is still fairly new to the Gallery, so if there's something existing that I'm missing, I'd be glad to hear it.

I recently found the following thread : http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Publishing-Gallery/Get-App-User-name-at-Run-TIme/m-p/775/highlight/t...

Which included a text box input with a title of "_cloud:UserID".  I was able to use this to pull in things such as the users login information, email address, etc.

I would like to be able to use a function similar to this in order to generate user-specific usage reports, or dynamically update a "Send Email" tool with the email of the running user.

However, when I inquired about this "_cloud:UserID" API call, I was told that it is an undocumented and unsupported call.

Ideally, I'd like an application/macro tool that does something similar - which takes the user's credentials automatically from the gallery and runs the Application based on those credentials.  This could modify Emails or filter the output of the Workflow.  I'm sure there are other use cases as well.  I think having an officially supported tool to manage this would allow for a wide variety of dynamic applications on the gallery.

We have a usecase where we want to check how often a workflow runs via the API so we can automate the consumption reporting we do internally. Right now the API only reads out workflows that were scheduled using said API. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Enabling it to also read out all the other workflows would really make this a powerful feature for us and I suspect others.

HI,

I could not find any possible way to send an email if the Alteryx workflow is taking more than expected time.

I was wondering if any such feature is available

In my organisation, Alteryx workflow keeps running sometime due to memory issues. It will be great to know about these delay and handle them.

Regards,

Vish

In our private studios and in our home page we see our workflows in grid view by default and can toggle that to list view if we want. 

BUT we can only see our collections and the workflows in them in list view.

Please can you add the ability to view our collections in grid view?

Password is required to execute any command on LLS. Last time we forgot the password, only way to retrieve it was to reinstall the LLS ! 

A command to reset password in LLS should do.

@Kosi @SeanAdams @ydmuley @RajK @LizaNemchynova @Arianna_Fuller @MPistone 

Many organizations have IT applications (Splunk, OSIsoft PI, etc.) that can consume, historize, and monitor Windows Performance Monitor items.  If would be great if Alteryx wrote application-specific information to PerfMon.  Things like: number of engines running, number of workflows in the queue, number of people logged into gallery, time it takes for data to pass between DB/Controller/Gallery, etc. This would go a long way in helping admins to properly size systems and monitor them for upsets.

One needs to obtain a designer license in order to have a server license.

It may be a good idea to package those two don't you think, and now it's ok to install designer on a Server OS.

It would be awesome if you automatically have a virtual desktop environment to connect to...when you get a server license,

The following is a slide from Inspire 2016 and the client's are already doing this

1. For keeping the running workflows unaffected by docking undocking workstations

2. It also increases the performance by getting the designer closer to the data

3. It would also be safe to share company analytics capabilities with outsider without giving them direct access to downloadable data etc.

In the example given, there are four scheduled jobs running in the server at the moment and one manual job is being triggered by the user and is in a queued state for more than 30 minutes to start running. However, in MongoDB, when a job is triggered, that time is captured as the start time (not considering the queue time). If we consider the start time of As_Queue in our workflow, we ended up with a mess. Since that manual job is queued for 30 minutes and running for only 3.30 hours, it is being killed by our workflow. It should only be killed after 4 hours.  

• How did we determine the total queue time & the execution start time for the running/queued jobs? 
• How do I kill this job automatically after four hours while taking queue time into consideration? 
• Is there any other way to kill the manual jobs after four hours? Please note that scheduled jobs will be killed automatically by the system after four hours.

If you run an Alteryx app on your desktop or hard drive, a help button will appear in the bottom right. This button defaults to sending you to help.Alteryx.com, but you can adjust it to send you to any location by adjusting the app in the interface designer. This means that you could use the help button to send users to a location detailing how to actually use the app built. The issue comes that when you upload an Alteryx app to the Alteryx Gallery, the "help" button disappears. I propose that the help button be made available in the Alteryx gallery for apps so that designers can use it to direct users to locations detailing how to use the apps.

My question is, is there a way to see after a job is executed how much memory it consumed in total? Today we have monitoring set at server level that records memory consumption over time but it doesn’t tell which job caused the spike unless we manually go and check list of jobs executed around that time frame. Even with that we cannot know for sure which job is causing the spike.  

Today there is no realtime inbuilt job monitoring tool that can answer questions like above.